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M2M: the sleeper awakes

Jeremy Green

M2M: the sleeper awakes

Announcements from Jasper Wireless, KPN, Ericsson and Qualcomm all point to a revival of interest in wireless M2M on the part of both vendors and operators. During 2009 there have been several announcements in the machine-to-machine (M2M) space. Ericsson announced a mobile broadband module specifically for consumer electronics applications; Qualcomm and Verizon established an M2M joint venture as a separate company; and KPN announced new partnership arrangements with M2M platform provider Jasper Wireless, which nicely followed Jasper's deal with AT&T in May.

New M2M business models are beginning to emerge

There are clear signs that this renewed interest is driving the emergence of new business models for M2M. Previously, MNOs have worried that M2M subscriptions, which are typically low traffic and low revenue, risked diluting ARPU and thus impacting on the financial sector's view of them. Although M2M barely shows up in operators' KPIs at the moment, it has the potential to have a very large impact - particularly if some of the more bullish forecasts are realised.

Increasingly, though, operators are taking steps to mitigate this, both by educating relevant audiences and by reorganising M2M activities into separate business units which report separately; Telenor's Connexion, a separate company within the Telenor Group, was an early example of this.

Jasper's own case is a further illustration of this. Initially, the company provided services directly to corporate clients, aggregating connectivity, devices and SIM cards, and presenting to customers much like a specialist M2M MVNO - though it always fought shy of the term. Now Jasper presents itself as a software provider which sells solutions to corporate customers using the operators as partners and channels. It takes a revenue share from the operators, making it possible for the latter to provide the solutions which are needed without worrying that someone else is poaching their most valuable customers.

Things ain't what they used to be

The M2M category itself is also in the process of transformation. Traditionally, M2M has been about communication between 'things', defined as objects without any kind of user interface, and applications. Increasingly, though, the concept is being broadened to include devices where the user interface is in plain sight but the connectivity and the network are invisible to the end user.

The most obvious example of this is Amazon's Kindle, but recent developments have included the Brazilian games console Zeebo (connected to Claro Brazil's HSPA network) and the TomTom in-car navigation device; the latter ships with a SIM card and a short-term subscription, which the end user may choose to extend in order to receive value-added services such as realtime traffic information. Jasper's announcement of its partnership with KPN was simultaneous with another by the operator that it is partnering with Garmin so that the manufacturer can provide connected personal navigation devices.

For once, technology is lagging behind the business framework

Despite the renewed enthusiasm, there are still important barriers on the road to widespread take-up of M2M. Curiously, this seems to be one of the rare cases where the business model has evolved more quickly than the technology. The connectivity part of M2M solutions is not particularly problematic; most applications are low bandwidth and not particularly demanding in terms of latency.

But network connectivity is almost the only part that isn't problematic. Most solutions use their own specific hardware, with unique interfaces between the machine or sensor and the communications module. Almost every solution uses unique software, with no ability to reuse components across verticals.

Jasper is pursuing the idea of a universal driver for M2M, which will enable different kinds of applications and hardware to communicate with the network - analogous to the printer driver which allows different PC applications to use a common printer. This is important and useful, but seems to us to be insufficient to really make M2M take off.

Needed: an architecture for M2M

What M2M really needs is an architecture. This would define interfaces between different layers, protecting developers at each level from the complexity that pertains at all the other levels. It's this approach that has made the Web so massively successful; but there is little sign of anything like it in the M2M domain. There are some isolated standardisation projects within the IEEE, but they have borne few fruits.

In the words of one important academic paper in this area, entitled 'Towards Physical Mashups in the Web of Things': “_most projects in this field are based on monolithic system architectures, which are brittle and difficult to adapt_developing a new application in a specific domain requires strong skills across a wide spectrum of technologies.”

A web-like architecture would turn this on its head, enabling (as the same paper puts it) “physical mashups in the Web of things”. The trouble is that establishing this requires lots of input, and probably a big sponsor too, to see it through. Right now there does not seem to be an obvious candidate for such a role.

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